Johnny Mack Brown          

From 1943 to 1950, Johnny Mack Brown was one of our top moneymaking western stars.  That bothered a few people over at MGM.  They had him under contract until boss man Louis B. Mayer let him go.

"Who would pay to see a soft-spoken boy from Alabama?  Mayer questioned.

Millions of kids, that's who.  Brown's pictures played so many kids' matinees that theater managers developed his southern accent.  "Fighting with Kit Carson" was his first big serial and had a shooting schedule he described as "rush, rush, rush"---25-30 pages of script per day for 22 days with few retakes.  At Universal, he rushed through two serials at the same time.

"I'd do a scene for one, then get on my horse and ride over a hill and do a scene for the other," he recalled in '65.  "Back and forth I went every day until one or the other was finished. And I never once changed hats."